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Today you have a real treat. Episode 1 of 2 of a podcast that I recorded with Jon Maddog Hall. Jon and I go way back in Open Source and I made the seven hour round trip to drive to meet him to record this, and then go on a walk around Cambridge where we promptly turned into snowmen walking around the campuses of the colleges. A great time with someone I’m very proud of calling a friend and someone who has made such massive changes to the way computing globally is consumed and understood. A lifetime as an educator and as a voice of reason.

I’ve been really looking forward to recording this podcast. We couldn’t quite make time to do it when we were both at Summit recently but we’ve made up for it this week. With big data the latest hot topic, with GlusterFS making so much headway it was time I recorded this. Storage is the last major building block of Cloud so this became even more critical.

I’m pleased to be able to release this podcast recorded with John Mark Walker, who I work with at Red Hat (he heads up Community at Gluster) but who I’ve worked with for nearly thirteen years or more at previous roles in the Open Source world. We’re both war weary veterans who still get fired up by Linux and Open Source. John Mark is both a friend and a mentor as well as someone who has a “can do” attitude in the Linux community. He has a message and a drive and if you listen to this podcast it will become clear just why he is so passionate about what we do.

The thing that makes this podcast even more special is that we recorded this online five thousand miles apart. I’d played with doing this over audio conference, over Skype, VoIP and other methodologies and all sucked – unusable when I did my testing, certainly not broadcastable.

So thanks to Pulsecaster and Google Hangouts, and a quick mix on Audacity (no Mac here folks) you have a podcast to download that I hope sounds okay and that will both educate and entertain.

We also talk about the November 1st Developer Day in the UK and talk about the whole Open Source community ethos around what we do and what drives us. It’s well worth a listen and I encourage you to do so.

Guy Martin a fellow staffer at Red Hat just published a story on the services blog at redhat.com which I’d like to share a brief snippet with you and you can follow the link to the rest of the story which makes great reading.

“Open Source is not only a business model for Red Hat; it’s ingrained into the DNA of the company. Because of this, Red Hatters can generally count on their co-workers understanding both the fundamentals of open source, as well as the ethos and methodologies that go with it. However, within Red Hat Services, the consulting teams often get customer questions around these topics, or hear from employees of our customers who relay things they’ve heard regarding adoption of open source within their enterprise.

So, with apologies to David Letterman, I’d like to share the Top 10 Signs Your Enterprise Doesn’t ‘Get’ Open Source. While this is meant to be a somewhat humorous look at the topic, I also think it’s an informative way to talk about improving an enterprise’s effective use of open source technologies and methodologies. I’ll break down the list not by rank order, but by three areas that customers typically encounter when dealing with open source: Consumption, Collaboration, and Creation. I’ll also put in a few thoughts abouthow to address each of these from an improvement perspective.”